In my opinion, and perhaps @hawk can chime in, the feature has been far less useful in practice than we hypothesized it would be.
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If that is the case, itās not the fault of the feature necessarily, IMHO.
I did try this and used it quite a bit at Namati, and I use it here on meta too. Itās pretty handy actually to know if colleagues in the group message or the person we are engaging within that message has actually seen the message. So I like it and do take advantage of it.
The OP is more an inquiry about the extent to which we can have parity with a whatsapp feature, which is purely technicalā¦ did the message reach their phone? Did it get opened on the phone? Itās not so much trying to evaluate whether the person took the time to cognitively take in the message and understand it. I know that type of data is kept in discourse as well (e.g. time spent reading in a topic) but thatās not what I was asking for back then.
I know discourse is not a phone app like whatsapp and totally understand that we canāt really expect to know the moment someone has been notified and if they have seen the notification in their email.
That said, there are definitely cases when you might want to invite people to a group so they can participate in some time sensitive discussions and receive materials on a timely basis. At Namati the biggest challenge was organizing an annual leadership course - people had to receive course materials ahead of time and do some small assignments in preparation for the course. There were also logistical details they needed to receive and deal with. It was a frustrating challenge to get them to engage.
Maybe a discourse group option could be contemplated to make this happen. E.g. if you are in this group, show that you have received and read posts in that category.
Then again, we now have the Discourse Policy plugin and Namati could use that to 100% make sure people respond.
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Quote, emphasis mine:
Just for completeness: knowing if somebody has seen a message via the e-mail interface would technically be possible via e-mail read receipts or (less nice) a tracking image. Since Discourse interacts so well with e-mail currently, it could be reasonable to also bring the read receipts feature there.
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Yo, man 
This is not crazy, this options for private messages have in more (older) CMS like XenForo, IPS, Vbulletin, Flarum, MyBB and itās convenient.
I really donāt understand why Discourse show more users information in /summary and donāt have option to show datetime when user read my private message. This is technically illogical.
Sorry for my bad English 
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If you are admin and really need this information, you can query out the data via Discourse Data Explorer plugin.
We also provide an indication of who has read a message in private group inboxes.
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